Josef Mengele

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ON THIS DATE in 1844, the Young Men's Christian Association was founded in London. In 1918, the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood, which resulted in a U.S. victory over the Germans, began in France. In 1925, Walter Percy Chrysler founded Chrysler Corp. In 1933, the first drive-in movie theater opened, in Camden, N.J. In 1944, in World War II Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in the D-Day invasion of Europe. In 1966, black activist James Meredith was shot and wounded as he walked along a Mississippi highway to encourage black voter registration.

The U.S. Army detained Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele after World War II but released him months later because he could not be identified properly, according to notes and letters Mengele sent to his son.The ''Angel of Death'' who was responsible for the killing of 400,000 Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp avoided detection while he was detained because, for reasons of vanity, he had refused to tattoo his blood type in his armpit as all SS officers were...

Handwriting in documents believed written by a man who drowned six years ago has been positively identified by American and Brazilian experts as that of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, police said Friday.Police said their preliminary conclusion was that the Nazi war criminal was dead.Federal police chief Romeu Tuma said the ''comparison of documents we believe written by the dead man with authenticated documents sent from Berlin is positive.''Legal experts said the finding did not definitively prove that the man who died in the 1979 drowning incident was Mengele, known as the ''Angel of Death'' and charged with the murder of 400,000 death camp victims during World War II, but was strong corroborative evidence.

West Germany, Israel and the United States announced Friday a new coordinated effort to track down and prosecute Josef Mengele, the elusive Nazi death camp doctor.The Justice Department said law enforcement officials of the three countries will open lines of communication among prosecutors and investigators with the aim of bringing Mengele to trial for crimes against humanity.West German arrest papers charge him with selecting victims for gassing and medical experiments at the Auschwitz extermination camp more than 40 years ago.The new international cooperation follows years of virtually no major efforts to find Mengele, now regarded as the world's most wanted fugitive, with a price of nearly $4 million on his head.

Because of numerous complaints from families of servicemen unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, the U.S. Army has hired three forensic scientists to evaluate methods used to identify remains of servicemen killed in the Vietnam War.Among the three who will study the methods of the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii is University of Florida anthropologist William Maples.Maples, curator of anthropology at Florida State Museum in Gainesville, said Thursday Army officials contacted him several weeks ago.Department of Defense spokesman Maj. Keith Schneider would not confirm or deny the report.

Forensic experts Monday found what they believe is an old pelvic fracture in the skeleton of a 1979 drowning victim that could confirm the body as Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele's.''If we confirm a fracture and if it matches information from abroad, then we have taken a great step towards identification,'' forensic pathologist Wilmes Teixeira said.Reports from Germany said Mengele might have suffered bone damage either from a war wound or from an automobile accident while he worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As ''The Angel of Death,'' Josef Mengele decided which prisoners at the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp were sent to the gas chamber and which he would use in his macabre experiments.Mengele was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 people in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He fled to South America at the end of World War II and obtained Paraguayan citizenship in 1959 but it was revoked in 1979 under international pressure.He became the most wanted criminal in the world -- with a bounty of $3.5 million on his head, though it was not known whether he was still alive.

A woman has told police that a man who identified himself as the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele lived with her family in Brazil from 1961 to 1974 and died here in 1979, testimony showed Saturday.Gitta Stammer, 65, said the man who managed her family's farm admitted he was Mengele after she confronted him in 1962 with a newspaper photograph of the Auschwitz death camp doctor.In the report on her testimony, Stammer also is quoted indirectly as saying that she and her husband had been afraid of denouncing Mengele ''because he made veiled threats that something bad might happen to her children.

Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz, was a ''tired old man'' who lived a ''paranoid existence'' in his later years, the head of the U.S. medical team that examined bones believed to be Mengele's said Saturday.Dr. Leslie Lukash, chief medical examiner of Nassau County on Long Island, said he believed ''with reasonable scientific certainty'' that the skeletal remains in Brazil were those of Mengele.The international team of medical experts in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday positively identified a 1979 drowning victim as Mengele, the ''Angel of Death'' who sent 400,000 people to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Schindler's List can be daunting for youngsters, but parents looking for films to inform their children about the Holocaust might consider a collection of 20 Holocaust tapes from Ergo Media, a distributor of videos on Jewish subjects in Teaneck, N.J.Several of the Ergo tapes are geared to young people. In The Sorrow: The Nazi Legacy, for example, a filmmaker named Gregor Nowinski gathers six Swedish high school students and takes them on a trip to Auschwitz.''He sensed a forgetfulness in Sweden and thought he'd show these young people what comes out of irrational hate,'' said Jane Zylberman of Ergo.